He gets out of town immediately afterward on a freight train, and meets the young runaway Kitty Twist, a savage character who enjoys causing mayhem. “You know what the best kick of all is, Red? It’s when you put a gun on grownups and watch them go all to pieces and blubber right before your eyes. That’s the best.” She sounds like Knifey Sawicki, snapping his gum. They do a robbery together, and Dove gets the money while Kitty gets pinched. While counting his money, he finds Teresina’s handkerchief in his pocket, and feels remorse, “a shadowy apprehension that he might never hurt anyone except those who were dearest.” However, he is not haunted by guilt in the way of Cass, Bruno, and Frankie—remorse glimmers, and then is forgotten. Because of this, it is hard to sympathize completely with Dove.
Dove travels to New Orleans, where he has a series of misadventures trying to survive, in the manner of Huck Finn or Candide, but with more raunch. Nelson re-creates some of his own experiences in New Orleans in the early 1930s—the girl showing her breasts while selling pop, along with the door-to-door sale of coffeepots and skin lighteners and phony certificates for marcel waves at the Madame Dewberry Beauty Parlor. “I was only tryin’ to make an honest dollar in a crooked sort of way,” Dove explains. Later he gets work at a home condom factory, run by a cynical ex-abortionist, before finding his true calling as a performer in a live sex show, pretending to deflower prostitutes pretending to be virgins.
The novel mocks the American Horatio Alger ideal of climbing the ladder of success—“Those with better sense began at the top and worked their way down, the route being faster…. The Ladder of Success had been inverted, the top was the bottom, and the bottom was the top.” Though the maxims from The Communist Manifesto that began sections of Somebody in Boots are gone, the book is even sharper against the false promises of capitalism, though it offers no alternatives. It compares the ordinary struggling working American to a turtle waiting to be cut up into soup—“they believe all things will come to him who will but struggle.” The novel scorns both the Chamber of Commerce “do-righters” who sleep with hookers and then feel they need to purge their guilt by going to a preacher who will blame the sinful women, and the politicians who believe the poor can take care of themselves while the rich need government help. “When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough.” Some of the book’s sexual humor has not aged well, but the political satire is sharper than ever.
Dove’s sex show is run by Oliver Finnerty, the villainous proprietor of the bordello, who brutally mistreats the impoverished women who become prostitutes there because they have no other options. When their mill jobs close, they find work in the streets. Most of the women become mindless creatures for Finnerty because he treats them with such contempt. He does not even want them to pick their own names. “You can always treat a woman too good,” he advises Dove. “But you can never treat one too bad.” Algren shows how the stereotype of the mindless, subhuman hooker is actually the creation of the pimp and the john, in the same way the fragile, dependent female was created by her culture, as Beauvoir had explained in The Second Sex. Algren had read The Second Sex in translation, and while he may have disagreed with the idea of total equality between the sexes, he understood how societal conditions could dehumanize people.
One woman who does not lose her dignity under Finnerty is Hallie Breedlove, an educated mulatto who is a schoolteacher before the discovery of her mixed ancestry causes her to be driven away. Hallie is the mulatto heroine Nelson had wanted for Somebody in Boots, but had been forced to transform into the white Norah. When Dove first comes to Oliver’s house trying to sell phony beauty certificates, he discovers that Hallie has the same book of fairy tales that Teresina had, and he sees the picture of the tin soldier. Hallie continues Dove’s education using Algren’s old favorite, Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Hallie must be a terrific teacher, because in no time Dove moves from Hans Christian Andersen to Shakespeare and the history of Pompeii. Their brief affair is another of those strange, sunlit stretches in Algren’s books—with Dove and Hallie going to the zoo and sharing Cracker Jack prizes, and then seeing a production of Othello. Dove sees a glimpse of real happiness, and feels compassion and gentleness for Hallie. Love has transformed him—sent down its golden thread of escape—and his eyes are open to beauty again. “Dove marveled at the way the changeful light followed rain across the littered grass; he had never noticed how light fell before.” But this is an Algren novel, and it cannot last. Hallie is brooding on a child who died, and wants to raise another child away from the men who have tried to control her. One morning, Dove wakes up to find her gone, back to her old lover, Schmidt the legless man.
Dove gets drunk and winds up in Nelson’s old prison, afflicted with Nelson’s case of nettle rash. The jail is filled with characters telling stories, as if on a stage, taking their turns under the spotlight. A cell mate named Kline gives Dove the advice Nelson frequently used in his public speeches: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” On his release Dove goes back to Perdido Street, looking for Hallie, and finds Legless Schmidt, who is also looking for her. With Kitty Twist and everyone else at the bar egging him on, Schmidt beats Dove so brutally that his face is a mere paste. The scene is a redo of the short story “The Face on the Barroom Floor” from The Neon Wilderness, only this time, the legless man is killed by the crowd. After just having learned to see again through love, Dove is blinded. Dove has become the steadfast tin soldier, returning to his love only to be thrown into the fire. Somehow, Dove finds his way back to Arroyo, Texas, back to the chili parlor in search of Teresina. The novel ends without saying whether she takes him back.
A Walk on the Wild Side is a strange book—it is full of brilliant, poetic writing and is more fun to read than the earlier novels. But its emotional tone is uneven. It is neither a tragedy nor a comedy; this would not be a problem except that Dove sometimes seems like a human being and sometimes like such a drawling Lil’ Abner cartoon that it is hard to accept his struggles as real. Simone de Beauvoir, with her usual rapid perception, put her finger on the problem in a letter; in the second part of the book, she does not see Dove as a “living boy, but just a puppet with things happening around him.” But the book itself is alive, especially in the comic scenes, such as when Dove tries to get the coffeepot back from a lusty housewife, or in the grotesque kitchen factory where the “O-Daddy” condoms hang to dry.
The book was a success and got onto the New York Times bestseller list for fifteen weeks between June 10 and September 23, 1956. But the reviews were widely divided—with particularly vicious notices in prominent publications. There were great reviews from Algren’s friend Maxwell Geismar in the Nation and by Milton Rugoff in the New York Herald Tribune, which lauded its vitality and exuberance. In a private note to Algren, Geismar praised the book as funny and sexy in a comic way, and like Algren’s own letters. The white-haired poet Carl Sandburg also sent a private letter of congratulation, saying the book had balanced elements of the sacred and the sordid. James Kelly in the Saturday Review found Wild Side a “better-made book” than any Algren had written before, with plenty of freaks and hookers, “without a dull one in the lot.” There were also some interesting half-favorable notices—Harnet Kane, for example, in the Houston Post said that the novel was “probably not Algren’s best, for it is diffuse and fuzzy in spots; and yet it remains a work of integrity and a certain and lumbering comprehension.” Kane recognized that unlike Mickey Spillane, Algren was not playing with sadism for its own sake, though the reader is advised not to give the novel to Aunt Matilda. (Book critics of Algren were interested in what people gave their aunts—a Neon Wilderness critic worried about Aunt Martha.) Newsweek acknowledged that Algren took on a difficult job with the book, with the risk of falling i
nto bathos and theatricalism. The review faulted the book’s shifts in tone, but said the reader is “seldom unaware of Algren’s concern and compassion” for his cast of derelicts and finds sections with “an accumulative, phantasmagoric power.”
But Alfred Kazin, who expressed admiration for The Man with the Golden Arm, said in the New York Times that Algren’s latest novel was filled with “over-colored writing” and a “boozily artificial and contrived quality that makes me think of it as a fantasy.” Kazin suspected that Algren didn’t feel much for his subjects as human beings, “only a vague literary pity.” “It is impossible to feel that he really cares about these people, that he is interested in them, that these are human beings he has observed.” Though the review angered Algren, Kazin seemed honestly disappointed in what he saw as the book’s unreality, in comparison with Golden Arm.
The harshest, most wounding reviews attacked not only the execution of the novel but its subject matter, set among the Depression-era underclass. Did not Algren know that it was 1956, not 1935, and the public in the comfy postwar economy had better things to do than to invite home the poor, the maimed, and the blind? Time magazine said that Algren had kept alive the “literary cliché” that prostitutes have hearts of gold and bums are “somehow more steeped in humanity than people who work.” Time pointed out that Algren had to find a second publisher for the work, and his readers “may well wonder if his sympathy for the depraved and degraded has not carried him to the edge of nonsense.” In a scalding New Yorker column called “The Man with the Golden Beef,” Norman Podhoretz attacked Algren for letting his theory that the under-class was better than respectable people get in the way of his art. “As a protest novel, ‘A Walk on the Wild Side’ is merely petulant, with nothing, really to protest about except, perhaps, the current prosperity.” He also goes back to knock The Man with the Golden Arm for never discovering what it wanted to say. Podhoretz had not yet abandoned the left to become a leader in the neoconservative movement, but the review foreshadows his future. Leslie Fiedler in a Reporter piece called “The Noble Savages of Skid Row” complained that “what final pleasure we find in his novels we find, alas, as voyeurs.” Fiedler ruled that Algren was made “unfortunately, once and for all in the early 1930s,” and that literature has moved on and left him “a museum piece.” William Root in People Today questioned Algren’s entire attitude, wondering if his compassion for his subjects “might well be spent on worthier objects.” He argued that the compassion “represents a form of inverted sentimentalism”—the type that leads to the idea of the noble prostitute.
These harsh reviews did not exist in a vacuum, but came at a time of change in the way some critics were looking at novels. The New Critics of the mid-twentieth century took a scientific approach to the study of literature, viewing it as existing apart from history and politics, and even separate from the reader’s reactions to it. Social protest was not only politically dangerous during the Cold War—it was out of fashion. Fiedler, famous in critical circles for finding homosexual undercurrents in Huckleberry Finn, had once been a member of the Young Communist League but had seen the error of his ways. His indignation at Algren is like that of an ex-smoker coughing theatrically when someone lights a cigar. Nelson’s old friend Lawrence Lipton wrote in the Chicago Review in 1957 that Fiedler never lost a chance to confess “the guilt of his ‘innocence’ during the New Deal ‘united front’ thirties.” Fiedler’s and Podhoretz’s reviews read more like attacks on Algren himself than on the book, an argument with his statements on the dust jacket. There is no prostitute with a heart of gold in A Walk on the Wild Side—Hallie runs away from Dove, and Kitty is excited about his injuries. Lipton noted that voyeurism is actually condemned in A Walk on the Wild Side by Legless Schmidt, a character of great integrity who turns away from Dove’s sex show in disgust. The characters in Wild Side are not portrayed as actually better than ordinary working people—only as just as human. Fiedler’s and Podhoretz’s reviews read like premeditated attacks on the proletarian protest novel in search of a target—and Algren, with his National Book Award and the Preminger movie playing at the theaters, presented a nice fat one. Post–World War II American literature was “to put it mildly, unsympathetic to social literature and sociological criticism,” noted Algren scholar Carla Cappetti. Having written about the real ghetto, Algren was put into an ideological one. Nelson felt as though his critics were asking him why he could not be a good boy, as Gerson had asked with more justice long ago. Algren was presented as yesterday’s news—the big man of literary Chicago in the mid-1950s was Saul Bellow, who had won the 1954 National Book Award with The Adventures of Augie March. His hero had started in the ghetto, but had the good sense to get out.
Algren pretended he did not care about what critics thought, and made Podhoretz, Fiedler, and Kazin targets of his satire ever after—with cracks about “Justin Poodlespitz” and “Leslie Fleacure.” He claimed Kazin was “better fitted for measuring meat than literature.” In an airy interview with John Hutchens at the New York Herald Tribune in June of 1956, Nelson said that while he would just as soon not have had “ice-water reviews,” he believed that “a good or bad book succeeds or fails regardless of the reviews it gets…. The people who believe in this kind of book won’t be thrown off by the review of it.” But friends said that his behavior at the time showed genuine distress at the negative criticism, coming on top of his legal troubles with both Otto Preminger and Amanda, from whom he was seeking a divorce. Nelson grew more defensive about the novel over the years, or perhaps more appreciative, as the hurtful noise of the critics died away. In a 1957 interview, he admitted that Golden Arm was a better book, but that in a lot of ways Wild Side had “more vitality.” Two years later he claimed that Wild Side was “by sixteen furlongs and eleven lengths the better book…. It is an American fantasy, a poem written to an American beat as true as Huckleberry Finn.” By 1969 he called it “the best I’ve written or will write.” It especially pleased him to know that hookers and pimps liked it—a prostitute had walked up to him in a bar and told him he “got it just right.”
Despite the early mixed reception, the book has become a cult favorite and was an influence on other absurdist writers, such as Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, and Ken Kesey, along with musician Lou Reed, who had a hit with the song “Walk on the Wild Side” about the lower depths of New York City. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson also acknowledged his debt to Algren, and said that the ancestors of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang had a literary prototype in Dove Linkhorn. Also inspired by the novel was James Leo Herlihy, whose Midnight Cowboy is about a country boy who goes to New York in hopes of making it rich as a gigolo. Herlihy inscribed a copy of his novel to Algren, calling him “Boss of the Wild Side.” Novelist Russell Banks, who became friends with Algren in Algren’s later years, said the book was “a homegrown version of the European bildungsroman, to be read alongside Huckle-berry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, and Native Son.”
Besides his new book and his lawsuit against Preminger, Algren was in the public eye for other reasons in the spring of 1956. A theatrical version of The Man with the Golden Arm, which Algren said had been held back by Preminger, had finally opened off-Broadway to great reviews but small audiences that only half filled the Cherry Lane Theater. The production by Jack Kirkland, best known for his hit theatrical adaptation of Tobacco Road, closed after forty-nine performances.
Nelson’s love life, which he had always kept private, also had suddenly become a topic of international speculation. Appearing on the New York Times best-seller list at the same time as Algren’s book was the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, which she had dedicated to Algren and contained a barely concealed account of their affair. The novel about French intellectuals had won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. It was just as well for Nelson and Simone’s relationship that he never listened to her pleas to improve his French—it kept him from reading it for t
wo years. Asked about the book, Nelson said that a female novelist should have enough to write about “without digging in her own garden. For me it was just a routine relationship, and she’s blown it up.” He was just being honest, but it made him look like a cad.
In the same letter in which she criticized A Walk on the Wild Side, Beauvoir said she had not been bothered by Algren’s comments about her own book. She said she had only tried to convey a little part of their affair, and it was different from the “true truth…. Nobody understood that when the man and woman leave each other for ever, they still are in love and maybe this love will never die.” But he did not write her again for almost six months. Walking along the beach in Indiana with Dave Peltz in the summer of 1956, he talked about “Frenchy’s thing” as if it should have been a joint project. He wanted the books to be joined together—slap!—one facing one way and one the other. “So you could turn it upside down to read the other book,” he said. Dave thought Nelson was jealous—Simone was of worldwide importance, while Nelson was broke in Miller. Nelson did not think she was even half as good a writer as he was, and yet her dry, talky book was one of the top ten best sellers of the year. He tried making a transatlantic call to Simone that summer—an expensive ordeal in those days. But Claude Lanzmann answered and Nelson got off the phone. Simone told Nelson in a letter that it was just as well, since it would have been too hard to hear his voice without seeing him.
Nelson was single again in 1956. His marriage to Amanda had ended differently than it had in the 1940s—with the friendly division of towels and sugar rations and photographs. This time Amanda had given up her life and a good job in Los Angeles, and if they could not stay together, she wanted a settlement. He had sued her for divorce on July 8, 1955—complaining of “cruel and inhuman treatment,” and claiming that she had never considered his “physical and mental welfare.” According to the complaint, the quarrelling was so bad that it was impossible for them to live together. Throughout the summer of 1955, he sent her pleading letters from Montana State University at Missoula, where he had a lecturing gig, wondering why she could not just let it go. “For Christ’s sake let’s get this misery done and over,” he wrote. He told her his life had stopped since they had gotten back together, and he had been trying to find someplace he could work and live again. “If you have any idea that I’ll put in another five minutes of ‘marriage,’ you’re five minutes off.” He felt like he was fighting for his life.
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